Landscape of Farewell (9 page)

Dougald said, ‘I’m going down to Mackay for a couple of days. If there’s anything you need while I’m away, Esmé will take care of it for you.’ He looked at me steadily.

I thanked him, then I went over to the refrigerator and began to prepare our lunch.

My bedroom was whitely illuminated, as if a comet were passing across the sky. Then it plunged abruptly into darkness again. I sat up, listening. I could hear—or perhaps I felt it—the faint tremor of the mine. There was no knock or call. The house was silent, the dogs sounding no alarm. A car door slammed, followed at once by the sound of a vehicle driving away, its tyres crunching on the gravel of the sideway. I wondered if I should get up and investigate, but decided not to.

I must have slept again, for when I woke the light of morning filled my room. I got up and put on my dressing-gown and went out into the kitchen. There was no sign of Dougald. I knew he
had gone, but even so I pushed the door of his bedroom open and spoke his name. I had never been into his room. It was as plain as my own. A double bed with varnished timber ends was pushed against the far wall, the bedding roughly tossed aside. A tumbler and a small old-fashioned transistor radio stood on a cabinet next to the bed. He must have played the radio very softly, as I had never heard it. Scattered about on the floor were several open packets. I recognised them at once as packaging from those life-saving drugs without which our kind soon cease to endure. His sulking bitch was sprawled on a piece of sacking at the bed end, one grey eye fixed on me malevolently. She drew back her lips in a snarl and raised her head. I withdrew and went into the kitchen and set the electric jug to boil.

It was a strange feeling to be alone there, knowing Vita’s expectations. Things had changed. I was not sure yet whether I liked the change. While I waited for the water to boil for my tea I stood in the open doorway looking out into the sunlit yard. The brown dogs came from under the house and stood with me, scratching and yawning and considering the prospects of the day. I said, ‘Well, boys, we are on our own.’ The goat was watching me from the far side of the yard, her head up and her ears pricked, alert for a sign from me. I signalled to her with a wave of my hand, wishing to reassure her that I would soon be over there attending to her needs. I would do my duty, there was no doubt about that, whether I wanted to or not. I decided to
give her a treat of the sweet grainy mash that Dougald kept for the hens. It seemed unfair to me that she should be the only one among us to live out her days tethered.

I set off along the path with the bucket of mash after breakfast, closely attended by my two brown dogs. A sudden unaccountable rush of optimism took hold of me at that moment, and I stood looking around at the scene, astonished by the perfect isolation, the absolute stillness of this strangely pointless place. The morning was bright and cool, the air sweet and pungent with some flowering herb, the vast unbroken sweep of the scrubs to the south, where they met the soft rounding of the distant hills, visible at this time of day, behind me the small grey house and the outbuildings overlooked by the great broken tree. There was a familiarity in it all that moved me suddenly. I looked into the sky and saw a flight of birds sweep across the blue above me, their cries like the cries of excited children at play. I would soon be gone from here and would never return, and all this would be a memory. Could I counterfeit Dougald’s existence here? Be him in his absence? Alone and attending to the routine of my days, suspecting nothing of the existence of the old German professor, Max Otto? But of course I knew I could not counterfeit with assurance his deep attachment to this place. His attachment to his
country
, as Vita spoke of it, employing the word as if she spoke not of the nation to which he belonged, nor of a love of country, but as if she touched upon an
ancestral knowing grappled into the roots of his being so deeply that even he knew its influence only as an uncanny intuition—as if his country required something from him, a sacrifice, perhaps, or a homage of some kind, but not something he could name or on which he could place his hand and say,
Here it is
. Did his country make a call on him and on his capacities which he felt as an anchoring to this place? Was it a bond, indeed a bondage, that went beyond mere familiarity and a knowledge of things? If his country was his calling, then I could not counterfeit that.

The goat ate her bowl of mash daintily, making small bleating sounds of pleasure, and pausing to look up at me every few seconds, an expression of curiosity in her intelligent eyes. I saw what a truly beautiful animal she was. With what astonishment the whole world must have prized her had she been the only one of her kind, instead of one of the commonest of creatures. Looking into the velvety depths of her eyes I could not believe that she did not enjoy a reflective inner life. When I attempted to stroke her neck she drew back sharply and stood off from me, stamping her hoof, as if she rebuked me for this uncalled-for liberty, eyeing me angrily. Despite the indignity of her tether she was clearly a creature of great refinement.

When she had fastidiously cleaned the last of the mash from the sides of the bowl, I returned with it and the bucket to the shed where Dougald stored the bags of feed, which he kept by the door in two aluminium drums with fitted lids to keep the
vermin out. The shed was solidly constructed of heavy slabs of split timber and was a much earlier building than the house. The timbers still bore the marks of the adze with which they had been expertly squared to fit snugly one against the other. A red brick chimney stood at the end furthest from the door, and a small square window was set in one of the side walls. It was really more a one-roomed cottage than a shed. I supposed it to have been the original dwelling, where Dougald and his family had lived when he was a boy. It stood on the far side of the gum tree, beside the lean-to in which Dougald kept his truck. The timber slabs had been patched with flattened tin where they had come apart or been eaten by insects. Over time these patches of tin had themselves rusted to the thinness of lace, the raised embossment of the sign of a shell still visible here and there—an enduring advertisement of their original contents.

I set the bucket and the bowl aside on the lid of one of the drums and stood by the door looking in at the dim interior. When I stepped into the gloom, it was with the same feeling of guilty trespass I had known as a boy whenever I nosed about my uncle’s house while he was away working in the fields. The dim interior of the cottage was shot through with bright blades of sunlight, in which dust motes floated like worlds journeying in distant galaxies. The air was musty with the reek of damp earth and the droppings of vermin. It was the smell of the sheds and byres of my childhood. I took hold of the cool shank of an iron bar that
leaned against the wall beside me and made to lift it. Its weight resisted me, however, and I set it back in its place. I felt rebuked by, and secretly ashamed of, the weakness of my old man’s arm. Next to the bar was a collection of shovels and spades, their handles and blades of varying sizes and styles according to the uses for which they had been designed. On the dirt floor beside these was an assortment of worn axe heads, mauls, iron wedges and other tools. Most of the tools were from my uncle’s period and I well understood their utility. They were history. Another age. My childhood and my youth. A lost time. They would have puzzled a young man from this age and he would have looked on them as antiques. There were other implements, arrangements of chains, levers and pulleys, the uses of which were unknown to me. By the careful manner with which these things had been set against the wall it was clear they had not been discarded but had been put aside with a habitual concern for the morrow. No doubt set there in their customary places at the end of a day’s work, in the expectation that their owner would return and make use of them again in the morning—it is as well we do not know our last occasions.

I stepped over sacks and boxes, and ducked beneath bunches of steel-jawed rabbit traps that hung from the rafters by twisted lengths of wire, like the skeletons of roosting bats. My uncle had set such traps at the boundaries of his fields, where the open country met the woodland and the rabbits came out at evening
to feed on the tender shoots of his corn. When I reached up and touched them they clinked with a sound so familiar it made me catch my breath, and I saw my uncle crouched on the earth and in the action of reaching behind him to shake loose one of these demonic appliances from the bundle, his shoulders lifting as he pressed on the spring and set the plate. I could
smell
him, that man who had remained a mystery to me all my life, the peculiar acid sweat of him, as of a nervous animal. I had feared him, knowing him to be strange, a man obsessed with the fertility of his soil almost to the point of madness.

Odd pieces of harness, straps, buckles and horse blankets hung from the roof beams alongside the rabbit traps. The leather was grey and dry as biscuit to the touch. This suspension of forgotten things from the rafters among the weird shadows of the old cottage looked like racks of meat in an abandoned smokehouse. I made my way with care to the very back. In front of the fireplace, straddling a wooden trestle, were two saddles, the horsehair stuffing spilling from their pads where the rats had been gathering materials to line their nests. An iron cooking stove stood within the dark cavity of the fireplace. On one of the stove’s hotplates was a pile of stretched rabbit skins. When I picked up the topmost skin the light shone through it and I saw that it had been eaten through by moths and worms. The prepared skins may have been readied for a buyer who had never come back to claim them. I turned to leave the cottage and struck my shin against something.
I bent and lifted it out of the way. It was a child’s tricycle. Had it been Dougald’s? With care I put it to one side.

Outside, the dogs greeted me and I stood and breathed the sweet fresh air. So much is forgotten. So much remembered. The trivial and the minute sit before us as if we experienced them only yesterday, and the greatest events are forgotten. Did I remember the day the war began? No, I did not. But I did remember the first day my sister attended school, an event that took place in the same year—and I remembered my uncle’s smell! The smell of human anxiety, rancid and sharp. There is much memory in a smell.

Perhaps I had shouted or gesticulated. I had been dreaming of my uncle’s farm and woke knowing the occasion of the dream. Its narrative was intricate, extensive, cluttered and unclear, but it was, I knew at once, associated with Dougald’s old cottage. I felt as if the dream had been going on all night. I reached to the end of the bed for my dressing-gown and draped it around my shoulders. Through my uncurtained window the moon was a half-disc in the star-filled sky: patient, placid, an eternal observer—I might have been marooned on a drifting spaceship. The dream clung to my mind. It was still going on. I got out of bed and put on the light and looked into the kitchen. The door to the yard was open as I had left it. The tracery of the tree’s shadows cast blackly onto the luminous ground of the concrete
the bright first state of an etching. I could feel Dougald’s absence, an intensification of the peculiar silence, throbbing faintly with the engines of the mine—the engines of my spaceship, nudging me deeper into the dark, cold, interstellar spaces.

I closed my bedroom door carefully, so as not to disturb the night, as if I feared to be really present there. I picked up my journal from the floor beside my bed and got in under the blankets. As soon as I began to write, my thoughts flowed effortlessly onto the page and I had no need to reflect on what I wrote, but set it down as it came to me. It was a story that was written in my heart. I am no longer the dreaming boy I was then. But what has changed? Inside, I mean. Nothing real. Nothing real has changed inside. All that is real has endured. Hopes, lusts, desires, dreams. All such stupidities as these have endured, even if I do not have the occasion to speak of them. And fear too. That also. It is all still with me. The strangeness of it all. The strangeness has endured. Here is what I wrote in my journal that night.

That first morning on my uncle’s farm, when the light in the east was a splinter of anxiety along the horizon, my uncle woke me roughly from my sleep, shaking my shoulders and urging me, as if the house was on fire, ‘Get up, Max! Get up!’ I woke with fright, my heart hammering. We did not stop to eat breakfast, but when I was dressed he made me go with him at once, gripping me by my wrist, as if he arrested me,
and striding a half-step ahead of me, his right leg describing a stiff arc before he planted it at each step, his shoulders dipping and rising with the laboured action of a man who hauls on a rope. Without a word more he led me in this manner to the distant field where he had been ploughing the previous day. There he grasped the collar of my coat and made me squat beside him in the headland furrow—was it his intention to bury me there, a living sacrifice to the fierce god of his soil? In the chill dawn light the earth glistened before my terrified gaze like freshly butchered meat, the sour-sweet smell of its breath in my nostrils.

My uncle took a handful of earth and held it up until it touched my face and I flinched. His pale blue eyes, in which there was something a little mad and something of the wolf, searched mine, holding me with his belief. He spoke to me in a voice that touched an emotion in me I had not known existed until that moment. It was neither quite the fascination of desire, nor yet quite revulsion either, that I felt, but a disquieting blend of the two; an emotion having its obscure origins in that equivocal region of the human psyche which urges us to gaze upon those things from which we know we should, in all human decency, turn our eyes away. ‘This is our soil,’ he said—as if he said, this is your soul. ‘We must care for it as we care for our lives.’ Even as a boy, at this first initiation, I knew he spoke of something sacred
to him, an indissoluble aspect of his innermost sense of who he was; that source from whence he had his origins. ‘It is the soil of our fathers,’ he said, gazing wildly into my eyes, as if he might begin to strike me about the head in his passion, searching all the while with a hopeless kind of desperation for evidence of my worthiness to share his certainty. ‘This soil is us!’ he shouted, and he shook me. ‘We are this soil!’ I would readily have agreed with him, and would have shouted my belief back to him, but I was too terrified and could not utter a sound. What had I to do to please him? He snatched my hand and thrust it into the newly turned furrow. ‘This is who you are, Max!’ He whispered to me fiercely, his face contorted and close to mine, his words catching in his throat. He might have been imparting to me the core of a mystical knowing that only my assent could confirm for him, as if something in him must doubt it until he saw it in another. I drew back, no doubt whimpering in terror, scarcely registering what he was saying, but expecting at any moment that he would jump on me in a wild, howling rage and stamp me into his earth. Suddenly, and with a sigh of resignation or weariness, and a flinging of his hands, he stood and lurched away along the furrow, leaving me crouching there. It was as if his madness exhausted him and he flung it from him like a garment that was preventing him from breathing. Like all madmen, however, he was not all mad.